Theresa (Quanhe) Wan

Interesting comparison of human-based ride hailing services (UberX, Lyft) vs autonomous-driving one from Waymo. TLDR: Waymo is more expensive and a lot slower to get you to your destination. And this is in the city where Waymo vehicles and software are probably most optimized for. This isn't to bash on Waymo and other self-driving car platforms, which have made incredible progress. That being said, the problem is not solved and it will take many more billions and many more years to get autonomous driving services like this to be price and performance competitive to current ride hailing services. https://lnkd.in/eb4uZ2Um #autonomouscars #AI

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I've mentioned this to #investors outside of sports and entertainment. The adoption curve for technology in sports is a hockey stick. Years of pilots in fast paced, high stress environments, but if the application is scoped out properly with the right forces behind it can lead to BIG wins in terms of adoption. I don't know much about AiFi Inc. but this looks to be an awesome example on the adoption for checkout free applications. Well done. For #roboticsINsports check out Hop Robotics

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Xian Ke, this is incredible! The speed at which you and Vishal Punjabi leveraged crewAI, Streamlit, and various LLM models to create Finbot, a powerful company analysis tool for investors, was mind-blowing. ICYMI, Finbot is here: https://lnkd.in/eSQD69qA I couldn't help but chuckle when I saw the Finbot name - it reminded me of the Wall Street Bets crowd. Maybe you can get them to yolo their life savings based on Finbot's analysis? (Kidding, of course. Or am I? 💎🙌) But in all seriousness, your enthusiasm and passion for AI and LLMs is contagious. It's engineers like you who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI and paving the way for a brighter future.🏆 I'd love to extend an invitation to any other software engineers from the bootcamp to join our Devs Do AI Discord server. It's a great place for engineers without an ML / AI background to connect with like-minded devs, share knowledge, and collaborate on LLM projects. DM me for the invite link. 🤝

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Waymo Expands Robotaxi Service to All in Los Angeles Waymo’s public robotaxi launch in Los Angeles marks a step forward in the quest for autonomous urban mobility. As the third city where Waymo has removed its waitlist, LA residents can now freely access rides across about 80 square miles. Collaborations with community-focused organizations like She Is Hope reflect Waymo’s commitment to making this service both accessible and safe for all. #MyTakeOnTech is that, from the innovations we are seeing—from Elon Musk’s vision of full self-driving with Tesla to Waymo’s public rollout of autonomous services—robotaxis could be a key part of our transportation future. Other companies like Amazon’s Zoox are testing their robotaxis in California and Nevada, while Chinese firms like DeepRoute.ai and WeRide are heavily investing in similar tech, working to accelerate the shift toward driverless urban mobility. Will autonomous vehicles soon be a standard option for city commuters? Or is there more innovation to unlock in this space? What are your thoughts on riding in a robotaxi?

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Today I'm sharing this 🔥 video from our recent Engineering onsite at Demandbase HQ in SF! https://lnkd.in/eFAFR6QG We were so fortunate to host Zhengxuan Wu and Aryaman Arora, two upcoming AI researchers from Stanford University Department of Computer Science. Their approach to fine tuning, called ReFT, targets the representations emitted by neural net layers rather than the weights of the layers themselves. This makes it very flexible when using the same base model for swapping multiple fine tunes. The memory overhead is also very low for their intervention weights. Another highlight is how powerful it can be. One POC they showed forced the LLM to speak in only emojis exhibiting ReFT's power to control output. Control is crucial when, for example, you want to prevent your bot from offering customers unauthorized refunds!! If you're already familiar with LoRA, it should be pretty simple to use with only a few extra hyperparameters -- details in the video. Here's a link to the repo. Give them a star! https://lnkd.in/eJScNbzK Thanks again for letting us host your first external talk Aryaman and Zen. It's very exciting tech!!

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Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

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Three insights from the TEDAI San Francisco X Factory X AI at Meta CodeGen Hackathon. Had the pleasure of judging a fantastic hackathon in SF yesterday. Here's the biggest things I took away from iteration on the cutting edge of GenAI for code: 1) 𝙂𝙚𝙣𝘼𝙄 𝙘𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙙𝙚𝙫𝙨 𝙖𝙩 𝚠̲𝚛̲𝚒̲𝚝̲𝚎̲ 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙂𝙚𝙣𝘼𝙄 𝙖𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨 𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙛𝙞𝙩 𝙖𝙩 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛 𝚛̲𝚎̲𝚟̲𝚒̲𝚎̲𝚠̲ 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚. Iterative agenic workflows can run at review with automated vetting of generations, and only serve edit suggestions shown to improve a tested outcome (i.e. memory efficiency). Bonus is that this can scale with inference time compute to try more or less variations or revision cycles. 2) '𝘾𝙤𝙙𝙚' 𝙖𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙗𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙥𝙩 𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙨 𝙖 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙣𝙤𝙣-𝙨𝙤𝙛𝙩𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙚-𝙙𝙚𝙫 𝙚𝙣𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙘𝙞𝙥𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨. Many tools in these areas involve cumbersome UI's that ultimately translate points and clicks into complex config files, and LLM's are pretty good at editing these underlying files directly. 3) 𝘾𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙢𝙤𝙙𝙚𝙡𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙜𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧. One hackathon team was able to use a combination of synthetic data creation/refinement and model distillation (in this case from my near and dear Llama 405B) to fit highly advanced code translation ability in a 14B model. I have a feeling this trend will continue, which will open up more inference compute heavy coding opportunities like broad repo summarization. Bonus here - the resulting model was open sourced by Jason Lu: https://lnkd.in/gswMbCR3 Shout out to SHACK15 and Cerebral Valley for hosting. Incredible views and vibes.

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In my opinion, this is one of the lesser discussed disruptions that we will experience in this decade. While widespread availability and economies of scale are yet to be fully figured out, this has enormous potential to reinvent last mile logistics, transportation and also road safety. Exciting times ahead !! https://lnkd.in/g9iUeADd

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A few months ago, I had the honour to be a guest on Qingyue(Annie) Wang https://www.thriveup.co/ podcast which focused on stories about my career pivot from microbiology to software engineering. I shared my somewhat mundane journey not knowing the profound impact it would have. To my surprise, during a coffee meetup, several people approached me to express how much my story inspired them. This was a humbling reminder of the power of sharing our paths regardless of how little we think of it. I had an idea to start podcasting, but I didn't know how or what to talk about. Until I met Fauwial Khan on a tech event who also had a dream of starting his own podcast. After a few intense brainstorming session on podcasting topics. Suddenly, everything clicked. We decided to create a platform to bring people together through their stories. That’s how Vancity Podcast https://lnkd.in/gxvdnnSH was born. Our first episode? Recorded with just a $12 Amazon earbud (we have proof!). Agile podcast development, right? Ship fast, get feedback and iterate. It's fascinating how two novices in podcasting were able to join forces and launch a podcast channel. What really propelled us was our shared vision and the small, incremental steps we took to achieve our goals. Upon hearing about our project, numerous individuals generously offered their expertise in storytelling, podcast setup, and interviewing techniques. I am deeply grateful to be surrounded by such kind-hearted and altruistic individuals. None of this would have been possible without their invaluable support. If you are interested to listen to stories told on Vancity live podcast, follow us on https://lnkd.in/gxvdnnSH. You know what's even better? share your stories on Vancity live podcast! Reach out to either Fauwial Khan or myself. #Podcasting #VancityPodcast #Storytelling #CommunityBuilding

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🤑 Here is a short summary on how Waymo is progressing in the autonomous driving sector 🤖 in the U.S. 🇺🇸. ↩️ Quick recap: 👉 Waymo was founded 15 years ago as the Google Self-Driving Project, already started earlier as a research project 🔬. Waymo was established 2016. 👉 Alphabet Inc. and other investors like Magna International, Tiger Global Management, CPP Investments | Investissements RPC 🇨🇦, Temasek, Andreessen Horowitz and others invested $15 billion in the company. 👉 In 2018, Waymo announced the ambition to order 62.000 Daimler Chrysler Pacifica and 20.000 Jaguar ⚡️ i-Pace 🤑. 👉 This highlights, AD development is a super long an expensive 🤑 development. This will take a while until the company will see a positive accumulated cash flow 😱. 📍 Status quo: 👉 Waymo is leveraging its positive 🌟 momentum: Other players like Cruise or Motional struggle, the own progress is enabling to step up. 👉 Instead of operating a fleet of 80k vehicles as indicated in 2018, the fleet is around 1.000 vehicles. The Pacifica is phased out. A Zeekr 🇨🇳 Van eventually replacing the iPace. 👉 In the 3 cities Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Waymo is netting a revenue of $ 75.000 🤑 a year per vehicle 🚐. Sounds a lot but the costs are a multiple of the revenue. 👉 Despite this success, the company is not profitable: Bank of America estimates a loss of $1.2 to $1.5 billion in 2024 💸. 👉 Waymo is reducing costs with the launch of the latest sensor set, the Zeekr vehicle should also help to reduce COGS below $ 100.000 per vehicle 🚗. 👉 Scaling efficiently to more cities 🌆 is the second direction. An exclusive partnership with long time frenemy Uber was signed, Uber taking over the not sexy part of fleet management. The demand on the Uber platform is used to generate rides. 👉 I agree with Harry Campbell that Uber could become one of the biggest fleet partners, taking over the messy business of fleets. Also agree that we will see a hybrid setup of AD vehicles and ride hailing drivers for a longer time. Challenges - two options to reach and scale profitability: 👉 Waymo needs to scale 🚀 its fleet fast enough and at the same time reduce total costs of ownership: 🔘 The driver stack needs to get cheaper while increasing the performance. Meaning less and cheaper sensors combined with a more powerful software solution. As we see with other companies, leveraging E2E AI models could be a part of the solution. 👉 Open up for 3rd party business: 🔘 Signals are indicating that Waymo is in discussions with OEMs 🤝 to license their driver technology, the latest is the report but Reuters about a potential partnership with Hyundai Motor Company (현대자동차). 🔘 Waymo could also become a development and engineering ⚙️ partner for OEMs, something we have seen between Bosch and WeRide. Exciting times 🤩… As always, just my personal opinion. Add yours as a comment below 👇 and feel free to reshare with others 🤳. #waymo #autonomous #mobility

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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You want to do Machine Learning on large scale Marketing solutions ? Check below 🚀

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Come join us tomorrow in SF to learn more about the latest updates to run AI workloads on Google Cloud!

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Who's got a Waymo experience to share? I just had my first truly bad one. First, I should say I love Waymo. It's not in many places yet, but it's poised to be everywhere soon. The app tells me I've done 26 rides covering 97 miles in SF and mostly it's been an exceptional experience. Apart from some quibbles like getting dropped off a block away up a big hill, it's a zen-like experience and a smooth better-than-human-driver experience on the way to wherever I'm going. But I think we're all bound to experience some hiccups as we journey to the future. In my case, I was taking a trip into the Financial District for an event and I had 6 minutes to spare given the ETA. Then all of the sudden it decides it wants to pull into the left lane, which is filled with parked cars. I sit at first amused at this decision. It pulls up right behind the parked car and waits. Then it goes through a dance of deciding it wants to get back in the original lane (everybody loves to snub a driverless car in traffic!) and pulling ever closer to the parked car ahead. Miraculously the driver of the parked car shows up, loads his trunk and departs with ease. The Waymo decides the next course of action is to pull directly behind the next parked car in the lane. My amusement fades. I call support via the touchscreen. My 6 minute buffer that had evaporated to 1 minute suddenly tells me I'll be 13 minutes late, a driver assistance team is dispatched and on their way. Yikes! Then magically (I think they manually took control), the Waymo behaves like a normal driver and inches back into the normal lane and I'm on my way, arriving 1 minute late to the meeting. So in the end, a bit of time stress for someone who really likes to be on time (I started a time company after all) and not really world-ending. In fact, despite this unfortunate experience, I'll be loyally riding again. And so I guess this ends as a parable about what Product Market Fit looks like. If you can mostly deliver superior experiences, there's room for rough edges. (pictured below, mom's first trip in a Waymo)

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A data-driven approach to driving wound healing outcomes Marcella Gomez, University of California, Santa Cruz https://lnkd.in/gAkWZYJT Meet: https://lnkd.in/g4AAWkcK YouTube Stream: https://lnkd.in/gwtqaTmf Talk details: https://lnkd.in/gWn3B3cU Subscribe for talk announcements: https://lnkd.in/g5ciuNuX Abstract: Precision medicine requires an ability to predict the response of an individual to a prescribed treatment regimen a priori. Thus, advancement in the field is challenged by a lack of predictive models and, arguably, a lack of time-series information for a highly dynamic system. Here, we discuss work in wound healing, for accelerating wound closure. We argue that timing of treatments is as critical to consider as the choice of drug or therapy. Due to system size and complexity, data-driven methods need to be explored to develop multi-dimensional quantifiable indicators tracking systemic changes. In this work I discuss how bioelectronic devices enhanced with deep learning can help facilitate real-time sensing and actuation for automated decisions in treatment for wound healing and preliminary work in transcriptomic based classification of wound states. Bio: Marcella M. Gomez is an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz in the department of Applied Mathematics and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Baskin Engineering. She received her PhD from Caltech in 2015 and a B.S. from UC Berkeley in 2009; both degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests are in the broad field of bio-control leveraging methods in machine learning and control theory. Applications range from controlling single-cell response to driving complex systems such as wound healing. #modeling #simulation #medicine #healing #trauma #predictivemodeling #datascience #data #woundhealing #biology #bioengineering #systemanalysis #sensing #omics

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Waymo's CEO just shared fascinating insights about the state of autonomous vehicles in 2025: The company delivered 4 million paid rides in 2024 alone - more than all previous years combined. They're now doing 150,000 rides weekly and driving 1 million miles per week (more than a human drives in a lifetime). 2024 was their breakthrough year. They launched the first fully autonomous airport service at Phoenix Sky Harbor - anyone can now land and immediately hail a driverless car through the Waymo app. Unlike Tesla which relies solely on cameras, Waymo uses a multi-sensor approach combining lidar, radar, and cameras. They argue this redundancy is essential for safety - and they're the only company offering 24/7 service for the past 4 years. Their expansion plans are aggressive: They're partnering with Uber to launch in Austin and Atlanta They're testing in Miami with plans to launch there They're entering Japan, starting with Tokyo They've announced a partnership with Hyundai for 2026-2027 The safety data is compelling: Compared to human drivers, Waymo vehicles had 78% fewer injury-causing crashes and 81% fewer airbag deployments across 33 million miles driven. A Swiss Re study showed even more dramatic results: 92% reduction in personal injury claims and 80% reduction in property damage claims. The future isn't about perfect autonomous vehicles - it's about being significantly safer than human drivers. And Waymo's data suggests we're already there. This isn't a winner-takes-all market. Waymo sees a future where their technology powers ride-hailing, local delivery, personal vehicles, and long-haul trucking through partnerships rather than doing it all themselves. They're proving that autonomous driving isn't science fiction anymore - it's a safer, more efficient reality that's already here. https://lnkd.in/gM54MGVD

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